As Luck Would Have It. Derek Jacobi
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I made up for in terms of raw energy. I remember this Hamlet, which was the first of my four performances in the part, with the greatest affection and pride. It wasn’t the Youth Theatre production that was generally touted, but put on by the Players of Leyton – as we called ourselves – and we experienced together, with boys playing the females, just that camaraderie I never found in my one Youth Theatre production.
Mine was a black-and-white Hamlet, very simplistic, in which I tore several passions to several tatters, but for all that it may have had something very accessible, entirely due to Bobby Brown’s careful coaching, because we received a huge amount of publicity. We rather outshone the main Festival offering, The Hidden King, a Scottish play with Robert Edison and Robert Speiaght, at the Assembly Rooms.
Hamlet had astonishing results. Mum and Dad couldn’t believe it, and were so chuffed. They ran a profile of me in the London Observer on the strength of which I was summoned to the Soho office of 20th Century Fox, where they told me I was too young for them. The Fox executive added that my only asset was my red hair, because it would photograph well.
Hamlet was a turning point, because although I had always, from a small child, wanted to be an actor, I was now really at the point where I thought: ‘Yes! I could probably make it work!’ My Hamlet even caused a spat between two leading critics, Alan Dent of the News Chronicle and Kenneth Tynan of the Observer.
Tynan pontificated patronisingly, ‘As Hamlet this boy would make a fine prose actor,’ which Dent took to be a slur on my performance.
Dent in turn wrote, ‘May I remind Mr Tynan that I once saw him [i.e. Tynan] play a dreadful Player Queen as a schoolboy?’
It was quite ridiculous. Here were these two critical giants clawing at each other’s throats over me, an eighteen-year-old!
Twenty years later, in 1977, when I did Hamlet at the official Edinburgh Festival in the Assembly Rooms for Prospect, an American couple in the audience sent word after it ended through the stage manager: ‘Can we come and see you and say hello?’ This was after I, Claudius on television had been such a success that I was known as ‘I, Claudius Hamlet’.
‘Are you here for the Festival?’ I asked this very sweet couple in my dressing room.
‘Yes,’ they replied, ‘and we’re also celebrating our twentieth wedding anniversary. The reason we wanted to see you – apart from being fans – is because we were here in the year we married twenty years ago, and you were playing Hamlet, and were still a schoolboy. We were so impressed that when we had our first child we called him “Derek”: and twenty years later here you are, still playing Hamlet!’
In earlier days, back in Leytonstone, Mark, who played Laertes, asked me over to celebrate with his parents, and his brother Tim who was Ophelia, and his sister. Mark had taken to wearing a large Astrakhan fur coat and trilby in the style of Bud Flanagan and his raccoon coat.
Mark’s father was a chemist who ran the dispensary at Whipps Cross Hospital. They cooked octopus in its own ink, and we drank wine with it. We never had wine at home, so wine with dinner was my introduction to a more sophisticated style of living. It was strange eating this new dish swimming in black juice, and I’m afraid I almost gagged.
‘Did you enjoy it?’ my hosts enquired.
‘Oh, yes, very much,’ I replied politely, so they insisted I had seconds: I had talked myself into a second helping.
Mum and Dad were up when I got back home, waiting excitedly for news of what we had eaten for dinner.
‘Octopus,’ I told them.
‘Octopus!’
They frowned. What kind of friends was I cultivating?
It was entirely due to Bobby Brown that I started my theatrical career. Bobby was a fantastic influence for the good, so he was the first to stamp Hamlet on the passport (metaphorically so, in his case) that gained me entry to the wider world.
Bobby had a passion for drama and later left teaching to join the British Film Institute. We often wondered if there was a lady in his life, but we could never quite work it out. But there was never any suggestion that he was interested in boys. He followed my career later with extraordinary devotion, and he came round after the shows to give me stringent notes and say devastating things when all I wanted to hear was lavish, unstinting praise!
Our withered-arm headmaster, Mr Cummings, didn’t wholly approve of acting and actors: he created fear in our eyes, not a bad thing for the maintenance of order. Now the school is a sixth-form college, stuffed with glass and hi-tech gear, overrun by security guards in luminous coats with clipboards.
‘All a bit cissy’ was what the headmaster thought of us then. Mum cultivated him through the PTA, to which she belonged, to look more kindly on our acting talents, so you could say she was my first agent.
I met Mr Cummings at some function years later and ‘You’ve done all right for yourself, Jacobi!’ was what he said: just like that – ‘Jacobi!’ But he was more than pleased to see me again, and to know me.
Grandpa and Grandma were always a benign presence in my early existence, but it was one that could not go on forever. When they were near the end of their lives they were both (though in different wards) in Whipps Cross Hospital, a walking distance away from Essex Road.
It was here that Grandpa died first. We went down the corridor to see Grandma to tell her. I was there with Mum and Dad, Uncle Henry and Auntie Hilda. We stood looking at Grandma, wondering how she would take it. I remember Grandma just saying, ‘I know, I know. He came to say goodbye.’
I could feel Mum jerk a little and pull herself together as she stifled her tears. Grandma died a few weeks later.
I knew that these wonderful close family relatives my good fortune had brought me would not last forever. I wonder now how they could have lived and died in such proximity to each other. Uncle Henry, with his yen for betting heavily on horses and dogs, had been bailed out more than once by Hilda. He died from a heart attack in the front room in Essex Road, his body blocking the door when Dad found him and tried to get in. Hilda had gone some years before from cancer.
Auntie had been a very strict mother to Raymond. They waited till he was twenty-one before they told him he was adopted. Discovering this had a traumatic effect on him and he began to drink. He was twice married, and had a girl and a boy from each wife. I became godfather to the eldest, Gail, just before I reached fourteen.
Raymond died before his time. I guess life in the end just wasn’t good to him. Gail became a croupier for a time working at the Trocadero, Piccadilly, and we are still in touch.
I had already picked on Cambridge as a means of entering the acting profession for good reason, and there were many there of exactly the same bent. I knew that Oxford and Cambridge were full of actors, and that it was how a lot of actors and directors embarked on successful careers. Most parents weren’t keen on their children going on stage and therefore many in the acting crowd I joined as soon as I arrived there had to make the choice between pleasing themselves or their parents, while I had the luxury of both.
I’d had an idyllic childhood, and now Mum and Dad were very supportive of me in whatever I wanted to do. Of course, they still had at the back of their minds that ‘Oh well, if he’s brainy, it would be much better if he became a doctor or a lawyer,’ because that was